Thread: lcd view all day and night?

Well if I do the slide in filter thing maybe I'll be able to slide it between the touchplate and the screen.

There have been a few threads on this over the years. From what I remember, the inverter puts out around 600 to 900 volts and very little power/amps. You need to lower the volts without decreasing amps or frequency. Otherwise you shorten the life span. On my lilliput, I traced the inverter source power and tapped into it, then connected it to the dash dimmer through a relay.

Originally Posted by tonystoolroom

I wonder what a 8" Data911 screen costs?

http://www.data911.com/main/display.html

Just got off the phone with them $2,585 for lvds display only, that is for the 8.4

I know most LCD displays use Cold Cathode fluorescent lights as the backlighting nowadays, but I've pondered using a material similar to the Indiglo material... Electroluminescent plastics. They can be dimmed much easier than CCF tubes. The coupld of LCD's I've opened all had a sheet of Lexan type material to distribute the light from the tubes at the sides of the panel to the entire panel. You should be able to just replace the Lexan with the electroluminescent plastic material and wire it up.

LED's wound be another option... Replace the CCF with a strip of surface mount white LED's controlled by a PWM circuit.

Of course, the ideal solution won't be available for another couple of years, but that is Organic LED displays. I was hoping the IPhone might use OLED technology, but it's not quite there yet. OLED displays will be able to be dimmed down as dim or bright as you need because there will not be a backlight. The display itself produces the light, just like the phosphors on a TV.

The inverters usually are really high voltage, that's correct. Some soar upwards of 10,000 volts actually. And some even have some pretty big draws like 2 to 3 amps. Sounds small, but milliamps are enough to kill you if they hit your heart, and brain frying electoshock is done with less than an amp too. *smile*

I could try to find the inverters source power and try wiring in a rheostat there to drop it's input voltage with a knob. That would probably effect it's output voltage, but whether or not that would change the resulting brightness of the bulb is another story. I don't know just what technology the bulb is, but fluorescent are not dimable by voltage. you can't just wire in a dimmer switch like you can with incandescents. Recently they have been able to dim fluorescents, but it's by way of blinking the power on and off very quickly to 'fake' a dimmer light.

Has anyone actually wired in a knob and had it work or are we all just brainstorming?

For now, I'm just going to make an overlay with some stout wire and hang a tint film over top of the screen at night. Exactly how I'm going to do that is yet to be figured out. I need to solve a couple issues for it to work.

1. How do I make the tint stiff enough to hold it's shape? The tint is very loose just hanging out by itself. Either I find a way to stretch it and make it work, or I find a thin base piece of glass or plastic and tint that piece.

2. How do I attach this to the screen? I could just hang it, but it might need something stronger. Velcro might be an option. It needs to be able to come on and off quickly.

3. Where do I put this overlay during the day? If it doesn't have an assigned place and holder, then it's most certainly going to get broken or lost.

4. In the end, is the new solution better or worse overall than the bright light? I don't want to diminish my CarPC experience, so whatever solution I come up with needs to not get in the way of me using and enjoying my system.

That's a thought... even if I have to get one and cut it down to size that might be better than the tint.